


Hold the Child

by Beth Harker (Beth_Harker)



Category: Newsies (1992)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-30
Updated: 2016-12-30
Packaged: 2019-09-30 07:15:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17219366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beth_Harker/pseuds/Beth%20Harker
Summary: Itey introduces Snitch to his first born child, and Snitch lets Itey in on a difficult secret that he has been carrying.





	Hold the Child

“Her name is Isabella,” said Itey. He beamed as he handed his squirming daughter over to Snitch, who accepted the bundle with hunched shoulders and stiff arms. Itey pretended not to see. He had things he needed to ask, but not right away, not until Snitch got used to the baby. From behind Snitch’s back, Itey’s wife, Franca, shook her head. Get our child away from him.. With pleading eyes, and the very smallest of gestures, Itey implored her to wait.

“You gotta support their heads,” Snitch said. His hold on Isabella was steady, though he bit his lip and did not meet anybody’s gaze. Itey understood the way that Snitch kept blinking rapidly, his eyes darting this way and that. It was a nervous tic that he had developed over the years, as he’d gotten older and decided that all of the anxious habits of his childhood were unmanly and needed to be stamped out. It made Itey want to take Snitch’s face between his hands and just hold it there. He didn’t. Franca was waiting.

“I can have her back.” Itey smiled and reached out for his little daughter, with a quick nod to his wife.

“You can start mashing up fruit for her in a couple a’ weeks,” Snitch explained. He was unaware of all the wordless communication that had gone on in the room. “You can give her baths in the sink, but you gotta watch her real careful.”

“You’ve done these things?”

“Nah, I only watched. Just with my sister.”

“Ah. I know.”

From what Itey had been told, Snitch and his sister had been separated for a very long time. Snitch’s sister could not be a baby any longer.

“She’s got eyes like yours, Isabella does,” Snitch said quickly, like he knew what Itey was thinking and wanted to distract him from it. “But–” he gave a short laugh, “her hair’s different.”

Itey grinned, and kissed his child’s bald head; Isabella had no hair, so her hair was different, and that was Snitch’s joke. “She likes you,” he said. He would need to talk to Franca about this of course, but Snitch deserved to be liked.

For several hushed minutes, Itey rocked Isabella in his arms, while Snitch watched. It was only when Snitch reached out to touch her tiny cheek that Franca turned to Itey and took the baby away.

“Walk with your strange friend,” Franca whispered. That’s what she’d called Snitch right from the first time she’d met him, always in Italian so Snitch wouldn’t understand.

“She wants us out of her hair,” said Itey, in way of translation. As they left the room, Snitch stopped in the doorway to tip his hat at Franca, who nodded back at him, somewhere between smiling and sighing. She’d always allowed Itey his friendships, even when she didn’t understand them, listening to his stories from the days before he’d met her, and granting him time to spend with the people who had made up the cast of his youthful mishaps and adventures.

Snitch and Itey went to the shared kitchen four floors below Itey’s apartment. It was three in the afternoon, so their only company was the pots and pans that hung around the room, and a bony old cat that probably hadn’t caught a mouse in the last decade.

“You want tea?” Itey asked. “Milk? Coffee? Wine?”

“You don’t gotta feed me every time I come over.”

“I like to feed you,” Itey assured him. “And water you.”

Snitch planted his head in his palms. He was trying not to smile. Itey didn’t even care anymore. His English was the best of anybody’s in his building. It was fantastic. No number of mistakes could change how far he’d come. “Should I teach you to count in Italian again?” Itey threatened. It had been hilarious the last time. He sat up on the counter next to the spot where Snitch was standing.

“I got no mind for it. Besides, you'se a family man now.”

“I have time for you,” Itey promised.

Snitch didn’t answer. When Franca didn’t answer Itey, that usually meant she either thinking something through carefully, or else she was angry. With Snitch it was harder to assign a meaning to his silences. He’d never been quiet when he and Itey were boys, but quietness had been creeping into him as they grew up.

About five years ago was when it had started. That’s when Snitch had begun to chatter away nonstop, but only about how he was lousy at talking to people. For the longest time he’d listed and listed off every small aspect of this epiphany he’d had, and then he’d started to catch himself, abruptly biting off words mid-sentence, or wandering away mid-conversation. It was possible that Snitch had trained himself to hold his tongue just as he’d trained himself not to suck his thumb anymore, but that didn’t mean that he was a master of silences. He stared and he fidgeted, started ideas without finishing them, and often avoided company entirely. The greatest blow had come when he’d left his church behind, and Itey couldn’t even be glad to see him away from that awful place, because now it seemed that Snitch worried all the time, and he wouldn’t tell anybody why.

With an appraising glance at Snitch, Itey hopped down from the counter and went to the sink. He poured water into a pot, and added to it a stocking full of fresh coffee grounds. “Franca says I must give all of our guests something to eat or drink,” he said.

“I ain’t a guest. I just stopped by to pay respects to your kid is all.”

The last time Itey had heard the phrase pay respects had been at Kloppman’s funereal. Pay meant to give over money when you bought something. He mouthed the words under his breath, and then let them go. “You came to see me,” he said out loud. “So drink. See me.”

Snitch made a show of widening his eyes at Itey, staring at him in an exaggerated way until they were both laughing, and Itey was relieved. He boiled the water then poured the coffee, with a promise that it would not taste like feet (the stocking was for soaking coffee grounds in, and nothing else.).

“Cheers.” Itey clanked his glass against Snitch’s, even though Snitch did not move.

“Hate to break it to you, pal, but you don’t do that with coffee.”

“You have no toast for my baby?”

Snitch just gave Itey a quick smile, took a gulp of his coffee, then made a face as if he didn’t entirely like it. Apparently there would be no toast.

Itey took a sip of his own coffee, and then another, until his cup was three quarters empty and the quietness was getting strange. “Something eating you?” he asked.

“No.”

“I don’t really mean something is eating you,” Itey hastened to explain. “Its a phrase. Do I use it right?”

“You use it great.”

“And nothing’s eating you.”

“No.” Snitch took another gulp of coffee, this time with a kind of choking sound. The drink was getting cool. Itey supposed that could be why. His own cup still tasted nice enough, though.

All at once, Itey was struck with an idea, and it was all he could do not to clap his hands in triumph. “Be my teacher, like you used to,” Itey said. “A friend has asked ‘What’s eating you, my pal, my chum—” Itey elbowed Snitch lightly. “What’s the way for the other friend to answer?”

“Nothing’s eating me. Thanks kindly for asking.” Snitch tipped his hat at Itey.

“Good. When a thing is eating you what do you say?”

“You talk about the thing.”

“Yes?”

Snitch put down his coffee, with an appraising glance at Itey. He wiped his hands on the sides of his trousers. “You really wanna know?”

Itey nodded. Of course he did. “Well?” Itey prompted, when Snitch didn’t elaborate right away.

“Used to think you’d understand,” Snitch gave a short laugh. “That maybe you was a certain way is all. And maybe I wasn’t that way. Maybe I still ain’t.”

“Which way?”

“Y'know. A way.. One that’s different than the others. Maybe not as different as I thought, but different.”

Itey shook his head.

Snitch’s face settled into a hard frown. “If you bothered to learn English you’d know what I was saying. You’d just know.”

“We know lots of people which always spoke English from the time they was a child, and still they didn’t understand you,” Itey pointed out. It wasn’t nice, but it was true, and Itey didn’t appreciate it when Snitch insulted him.

“I know. I know.” Snitch was pacing now. “Just… Do you understand me? What I’m getting at?”

Itey was sorely tempted to lie, but he didn’t. He spread his hands out before him, a gesture of openness and defeat. Snitch looked bereft. “But you can tell me,” Itey hastened to assure him. “I’m waiting for you to tell me.”

“Ain’t nothing.” Snitch finished his coffee in one last gulp, then looked down at the empty cup. “Don’t like this stuff. It always makes my stomach strange, and keeps me up all night.”

“Oh.” Itey said. He just wished that his strongest instinct was not to offer Snitch more, because if Snitch was bothered, the correct thing to do was give him something. Snitch looked down at his watch.

“I gotta go,” he said. “I guess Isabella wants her daddy.”

“She likes you,” Itey promised for the second time that day.

“I like her too. She’s a good baby. You got a good wife and a good baby, Itey.”

“I know.”

Itey went to wrap his arm around Snitch’s shoulder, to send him out in a friendly way, but then he paused. He wasn’t entirely sure if the two of them were still arguing or not, or if they had been arguing at all. Snitch had said his English was bad, but then he’d seemed to forget the topic a second later, in favor of whatever problem he was facing but didn’t want to talk about. In the end Itey settled for walking to the door with him, some questions unasked, and still more unanswered.

 

——–

It was a week before Itey saw Snitch again. They were in the habit of meeting at Tibby’s for dinner on Thursdays. It had been some time since Itey had been there, what with the new arrival, and he was running late, but he decided to see if Snitch was around anyway. Itey worried about losing track of his oldest friend, the way he had so many of the others, like Racetrack and Bumlets. It seemed that if you turned your back on one of the newsies for too long, they just disappeared forever, and Itey wasn’t ready for Snitch to do that. It was with that thought in mind that Itey decided to head over to Snitch’s house when he found that he wasn’t at their usual haunt.

It took two knocks before Snitch opened the door. He stared at Itey for a second.

“We back to meeting up?” He asked, as if it had just occurred to him why Itey might be there.

“Sometimes, yes.”

“Just ate, but you can come in if you want. For a little while,” Snitch stepped aside so that Itey could come into his apartment. It was small and filled to brimming with Snitch’s collections of springs and junk and things he’d been keeping since they were boys. It was all organized into boxes, and the place could not be called dirty, but there was barely room for one person, let alone two. Snitch sat down on the bed, and scooted over so that Itey could sit down with him. It was about the same size as the bed that the two of them had shared back in the lodging house, but the right side of it was covered in a pile of neatly folded clothing and a stack of books that Snitch hadn’t been able to fit anywhere else.

Whenever Itey found himself at Snitch’s place, which wasn’t very often, it was hard not to compare it to his own home. It wasn’t that Itey’s apartment was airy and spacious by any means, but he had flower vases and pictures on the wall. He, Franca, and Isabella had it all to themselves, but it was never isolating or lonely, for Franca’s parents and brother lived just across the hallway from them, and she had numerous cousins and friends also in that very building. Itey could not imagine living entirely alone as Snitch did, with only boxes of things for company.

“How’s your kid?” Snitch asked.

“She’s good. At night she doesn’t like to sleep, and in the day she only likes to sleep. She can… If I give my finger to her, she will hold it. She’s very strong, I think. She likes it when her grandma sings to her, but not Franca. Franca cannot sing and this is very funny to me…”

It was hard to tell if Snitch was listening or not. He was carefully untying his shoes, which he must have double or triple knotted during the course of the day for them to give him so much trouble now. He finished, and swung his legs up onto the bed, so his feet were close to Itey. Since Itey was no stranger to Snitch’s feet, he did not comment.

“How’s your job?” Itey asked. Snitch just shrugged. He was a secretary at a bank, and good enough at it that he’d held down the position for over two years, but he didn’t discuss it much. It meant that sometimes Itey had to work very hard to find conversations. If he hit on the right topic, he and Snitch could talk forever, just the way that friends who had known each other for nearly two decades ought to, but when Itey could not, he often found himself feeling lost and dissatisfied with their visits.

“You’re reading books,” Itey tried. He did not mention that none of them seemed to be religious. As a kid Snitch had refused to read books that weren’t.

“Someone leant 'em to me.” Snitch patted the pile behind them.

“There are so many! Did he lend you all the books?”

“Yeah.” Snitch was sort of smiling now. “His name is… um… Paul. He’s new at the bank. He’s strange, I guess. Really likes his books. Calls me Joe, not Snitch or Joseph, like the rest of you'se does.”

Itey nodded. The newsies had coined the name Snitch before Itey had even come into the country, and Joseph was the name Snitch had gone by for church and matters of official business.

“You have a friend,” Itey said with a smile. He was happy for Snitch, truly, that he would let somebody lend him books and call him Joe. Snitch had picked one of the books up, and was playing with the spine of it. It didn’t look thick and difficult, but it wasn’t a dime novel either.

“He likes… Paul likes to read poems,” Snitch said. “Ain’t that the strangest thing you ever heard?”

“No,” Itey laughed. “Because I knew a person who liked to sing bad opera on the lodging house roof, and a person who stole a watermelon and pretended it was his baby.”

“And a guy who collects rusty springs and never gets on right with anyone,” Snitch said, with sudden force.

“Yes, I know,” Itey said, for lack of any other answer. He had expected Snitch to laugh at the hijinks the other boys had gotten into around the lodging house, and was taken aback when he didn’t. Was he meant to say that Snitch’s springs weren’t rusty and that he was universally adored? Was he supposed to argue that these things were true but that they didn’t matter? “You get on right with me,” Itey settled on saying. “And your new friend Paul. You can have your springs.”

“I don’t get on right with him,” Snitch argued.

“You do! He gives you books. That means he likes you. He wants you to read his books and talk to him,” Itey was as patient as he could be in his explanation. It reminded him of all the times he had tried to tell Snitch not to say certain things to certain people, or explain what it was he did that made others angry, only this time the situation was reversed, and he was trying to explain how people made friends. He wondered if he would be any more successful now than he’d been in the past.

“You ain’t getting it,” Snitch insisted.

Itey had to force himself not to roll his eyes. This conversation was so predictable, just the same circle that they’d been going through a million times over. “I’m getting it,” Itey insisted. He wished that Snitch would look less distressed. “I always get more things than you think I do.”

Itey sat up defiantly. He could feel Snitch’s eyes in him.

“Everything’s a mess,” Snitch said. “I feel sick to my stomach, most especially when I think of Paul and his books.”

This, maybe, Itey did not get. Snitch ran his hand up through his hair, fidgety and uncertain under Itey’s close watch. There was something he wanted to tell Itey, that much was clear, but he didn’t want to say it. Maybe Itey needed to speak instead, but he didn’t know what to say.

“What if I just talk to you plainly?” Snitch ventured. Itey breathed a sigh of relief.

“Yes. Plainly is good.”

“And you can’t tell no one, not even them other Italians.”

“My mouth is closed.”

“Right. But you should say it like this: 'My lips is sealed.’”

“Got it. It’s sealed,” Itey put a finger over his mouth, to show just how sealed it was.

“Okay. Right. Good job.”

Itey waited. Nothing Snitch was saying struck him as speaking plainly. It was probably getting late, and while Itey could tell something was bothering Snitch, and that was important, his family was important as well. Just as Itey was wondering if he would have to leave, Snitch took his hand, and held it hard.

“Paul wants…” he started, with intensity that Itey was starting to comprehend.

“Oh.” Itey looked down at Snitch’s hand, which was almost white as it crushed his own. “Oh!” He shifted so that he was a close to Snitch as he could get. “Do you want…?”

Snitch let out a long breath, his jaws clamped in a forced frown. It wasn’t that he was unwilling to speak. He appeared unable to.

“It’s fine!” Itey hastened to assure him. Memories were flooding back to Itey. There were things that had happened at the lodging house, threads and stories and events that added up better all of a sudden than they ever had before. Snitch had kissed Itey once, for real, on the lips and not the cheek. Just once, Itey had dared to kiss him back. Snitch had always stared at Pie Eater when he thought nobody was looking, and Jack as well. He’d made friends with a girl one time, a certain Betty who’d been an acquaintance of Swifty’s, but stopped speaking to her when the other boys began to tease him about love.

“You can be with Paul,” Itey continued. He was trying very hard to sound gentle, and not as unaccountably excited as he felt. “Nothing bad will happen. I know it.”

Snitch shook his head, so Itey took one of the books and handed it to him, helping him to close his fingers around it. Itey wasn’t sure why he did it. Maybe to remind Snitch of what the world might offer him if he let it happen. Though Snitch was over thirty years old, Itey was fairly certain that he had never so much as kissed anybody other than Itey himself.

“You should believe me,” Itey continued. “I know about this. I know that if you do this thing, nothing bad will happen.”

Finally Snitch made a sound, something like a scoff. “You know about having a wife and a cute kid.”

“Yes. Now.” Itey hoped that Snitch would get the significance. He hadn’t been born the day he met Franca, and though he loved his wife with all his heart, that did not mean he’d forgotten all that had happened before her. Snitch was looking at Itey like he’d grown an extra head, and that was probably a good thing, considering the conversation.

“You have no wife,” Itey said, as firmly as he could. “If you have no wife, there can be a Paul. There will be no…” Itey gestured to the ceiling. “No thunders. No punishments. Nothing bad will happen.”

“I’ll think about,” Snitch muttered. The book that Itey had given him seemed to have done the trick; at least, Snitch was hugging it to him as he spoke.

“Good,” Itey patted him on the shoulder. “And I have to ask you a question.”

Snitch nodded, too drained for an enthusiastic response, Itey guessed.

“Franca and I have spoken,” Itey said. “You’re not catholic, I know it, but you are family. If you will be Isabella’s godfather, we will be very happy.”

Snitch gave a short laugh. “You sure know how to pick a bad time to spring something on a guy.”

“Does that mean no?”

“It means I’ll think about it,” Snitch said. “I got a lot of things to think about, so I might as well add that.”

“Alright,” said Itey. “When you know about that, and everything else, you must tell me.”

“I will,” Snitch promised. “I will.”


End file.
